Greedy Goblin

Thursday, March 24, 2016

After injectors: if you don’t pay $, you are worthless to CCP

Since time codes were introduced, you could play EVE for “free”, as you could farm ISK (farming is free for morons) and exchange it for timecodes. The community consensus is that such players are just as valuable customer as paying ones, since someone is paying $ for their account. If we assume that CCP played nice and didn’t make fake accounts, spawned a couple trillions to buy PLEX and trash it, this was true. However since injectors were introduced, it’s no longer true, not even in the ideal world.

With perfect remap and implants, an account will accumulate 1.944M SP in 30 days. You can put it into 3.888 extractors to create equal number of injectors. Since you can buy 10 extractors from 8000 AUR, you need 3110 AUR to buy 3.888 extractors. A PLEX can be turned into 3500 AUR, so you need 0.889 PLEX for the extractors and another one to run the account for 30 days. Below you can see the price of 1.889 PLEX and 3.888 injectors since they were introduced.

As you can see, the injectors were more expensive, so you can do this for pretty nice profit, with so minimal amount of clicking that even I found it a lucrative business, training over 50 pilots.

This is a groundbreaking result on its own. This means that subscription gaming is officially dead, not by the decision of greedy, game-hating suits, but by the will of players. CCP didn’t force anyone to buy injectors. I predicted injectors to sell for 100M over extractors as sellers will outnumber buyers. I was very wrong. Whales are buying SP like there was no tomorrow, greatly outnumbering sellers. It’s the decision of the players that the in-game item SP is valuable, while game access is not. If you run an account and sell its SP, you can play for really free and get 2-300M ISK as payment for those clicks to make the injectors. Sure, if you want to keep the SP, you need to pay (with $ or ISK), but you are paying for the SP, not the game access.

But back to the title. As long as running SP farms is profitable, there will always be farmers who suck up PLEX-es. So if you close a PLEXed account and no longer buy a PLEX, CCP loses absolutely nothing, as a farmer will grab it. If you farm ISK and buy PLEX to run your account, you are utterly worthless to CCP. You are a free player, who is tolerated to freeload on the product of CCP in the hope that one day you become a paying customer or can be sold as content for the customers. You are like the free player of WoT, who is kept only to feed the gold ammo buyers with kills.

So are you paying real money to CCP? If no, they won’t care a bit what you want and what makes you mad. You – and me too, as if I'd quit, another SP farmer would take my place – are worthless to CCP. Deal with it! And as tomorrow’s post will show, CCP will also deal with it, in the spirit of “greed is good”.

People who farm ISK to buy PLEX for their accounts are not completely worthless to CCP. Players that do that (such as yourself) do provide content. The game will have more people flying around, trading, and shooting each other, even if some of them are not paying.

Like I said all those years, SP is the greatest force multiplier in eve.I've been called... roughly the same names as Gevlon gets.Well, who was right, bitches? As soon as you could buy SP, everybody and his dog went for it, and "leet pvpers" who called me names are crying like no tomorrow, as if their dear leet skillz and experience got nerfed, gee, I wonder why?

P.S. Member of Mordus Angels for 7 days. Just you wait, gewnies, a few more injectors for fleet ships, and I'm coming for your butts.

1. "SP doesn't matter" was always the biggest most obvious lie in eve, and now there is economic proof against it (although even now it is still socially taboo to admit it, even with the proof). The reason is because people didn't care for the "2% increase to damage will make me win" skill like deniers always claimed, but they really did care about the. Few want to fly tackle frigate in fleets every night for 3 months and nothing else, despite claims.

2. There is a point where you will make so much isk that, unless you have interest in supers and titans, you will find literally nothing else you feel like buying. In this situation, you may as well buy SP.

In order to play sustainably, you still need to either buy that first PLEX, or farm ISK for it. And then the first moment when you slip in maintaining the extract -> sell cycle is the moment you lose your farm.

I know this doesn't seem like a big hurdle, but game design theory dictates that most people won't be able to clear it and will continue to happily pay subscription.

And that's before i challenge your assumptions of developer intent behind this :D. Where i live we have a saying that goes a bit like: "the world is not ruled by a hidden order, but rather an obvious disorder"

This does introduce a bit of a "pay-to-not-wait" dynamic to Eve, though.